They are turning into the sort of people I used to call Grown Up and I cannot stop them although I would if I could. I would slow them down anyway. Sometimes I want to shout “Wait for me! Wait for me!”
Like I did when I was little and they walked too fast.
They always turned back then, however much of a hurry they were in, but I do not think they can turn back now.
So I do understand.
Oh, excellent book! Even though it made me a little sad, because it is the last in the series, and because Rose is sad and lonely for a tremendous portion of Forever Rose, and probably because I am growing up much too fast myself and graduating frighteningly from college quite soon.
However.
It is my considered opinion that Hilary McKay should be much more popular in America than indeed she is, because her books are really charming and clever and funny and friendly. I stumbled on Saffy’s Angel while nosing around Amazon trying to find another smallish book to get my mother for Christmas, and I can really only shake my head in amazement at my good fortune, because the library had it (so I checked it out and screened it), and the bookshop had it (so I bought it and wrapped it and gave it to Mumsy), and then there were four more, eventually. Four. That’s lucky.
Forever Rose starts out sad. Everyone is gone. Caddy is gone and won’t say what happened to Michael, and Indigo has a job, and Saffron has lots of classes, and Tom is in New York and Eve is in her shed and Bill is in London and Michael is back in town and won’t look at Rose when he sees her in the street. That makes me sad just to contemplate. (Michael’s last name, incidentally, is Cadogen. Who knew?) Besides which her teacher is canceling Christmas and David is having a Crisis and her boring friend Molly has a mysterious idea she won’t tell anyone about.
But I liked it a lot, even if the ending was just the tiniest teeny bit too neat (ha, literally), because I like happy endings particularly when they are the endings of friendly books like these ones about the Cassons. And of course I will always read it again. Probably out loud to my future children.
I must also say that this book came to me via a very long and circuitous system of transport of my aunt and uncle’s friends. My aunt Gina, who is good at getting things, arranged for someone in England to buy Forever Rose (it not being out yet in America), and that person brought it to New York and handed it off to someone else and they handed it off to someone else and then to someone else and finally back to Gina. And then me. For Christmas. That’s a lot of labor, and I was much less inventive when helping my father buy it for my mother.
P.S. My mother says that if Forever Rose had not already been wrapped when it reached her, she would have read it. That made me feel much less guilty about reading the copy that I ordered for Daddy to give her, so I confessed all. I had been feeling quite guilty about it actually, but I had to, because it was right there, in my room, so eminently desirable, and I didn’t think I’d be getting it for Christmas myself! and normally I only read books I’m giving as gifts to Indie Sister or my very clever friend because I know they do the same with gifts to me and it’s fine, but I simply could not resist.
SPOILER
NO, REALLY
I knew she was preggers!